I’ll have to dig up the press kit to double check but I seem to recall that more than a dozen years ago, Puma and Fila were already selling about $250 million a year worth of Ferrari branded shoes and apparel. While a lot of people mocked Cadillac brand-strategy-whatever Melody Lee for her recent comments about turning Cadillac into a luxury brand, not just a seller of cars, licensing deals and brand extensions like the Porsche Design retail shops are now big business in the car biz. (Read More…)

If you exist outside the fast-paced world of the automotive branding community, you might believe that the point of car brands is to sell cars. Needless to say, you’d be wrong. The big buzzword around car brands, particularly the more niche and eco-friendly brands is “mobility.” As in “we must leverage our brand values to provide a broad-based mobility strategy for the cities of the future.” Or, to put it into layman’s terms, “screw cars, we gotta start building scooters.”